Today I heard from an engineer at a company we're co-developing a product with. This company cut every engineers salary 50% and had to write to the CEO why they desired their full salary back.
Also the engineers should should be thinking about their jobs 24/7.
This company is doing very well on increasing sales and apparently on profits. What in world is going on in this CEOs mind?

@twk, that's the best analysis I've seen. Follow the rise and fall of civilizations, and you'll see strong parallels to many engineering companies. Maybe it's time for engineers to sail to the Americas and form colonies modeled on their own vision. It may be a struggle at first, but it's certainly easier than overthrowing the empire, eh?
I've already sailed the Atlantic, and I'm back to enjoying life.

The commentary is interesting, having come through the post WWII growth in technology and really having fun with new TV, space exploration, automobile development, communications explosion, exploding recreation industries, and the like to day appears kind of bland with most observable engineering being much like the TV world - working mostly on reruns. I feel I went through the "best of times" and they are gone. I have two sons who are engineers but am surly not recommending engineering to my grandsons. I watched more than one truly innovative and creative business get smaller and less significant as their leadership was taken over by individuals with law, finance, and business degrees and there were no technical people in leaderdhip. I watched one being proud of no longer consulting with their corporate technical council and beginning to consult with their wall street analysts. They are now less than 20% of what they were. When technology makes life easy people begin to concern themselves with social issues and go to work to impose their visions of society on others. Things go down hill rapidly because there is no set of facts (like the laws of physics) with which to test the proposals and it reduces to chaos. I now consult, post retirement. I hope I have enough to survive my tenure on this world but am not sure. (there are so many trying to steal it from me) I truly enjoyed the good times, still live a pretty good life, and watch the whole of society deteriorate. Study a little history and you find we are repeating the past. The Romans rose on technology and declined on social chaos and did not manage to recover. Hope we are good enough to recover!

I've been at this engineering gig for 30 years and still love the challenge of solving interesting problems. Real engineers aren’t motivated by money management is. It is their only motivation, and they view engineers as a cost center to be off-shored where, as one HR type said to me, “I can get three Indian engineers for one American engineer.”. So until that mindset goes away real engineers will never be viewed as an asset to a company. Sure, we all want enough money to pay for the house, put bread on the table and put the kids through college. But corporate management sees that as greed on the part of everyone outside of management. Don’t get me wrong, put an interesting problem in front of me and I’ll be jumping in both feet and my anger at management types will be shoved to the background only to surface as the solution to that problem takes form and requires less of my brainpower. I remember during the moon shots science was important to us as a nation. Parents told their kids to go into a technical field. This is probably why so many engineers my age are engineers. Now science is scoffed at and basic fundamental principals are called wrong by politicians and media types who know nothing about science or engineering but do know how to count money. So yes these are bad times but let’s remember that no matter the damage done by the corporate and political type’s real, working engineers, not managers, will come to clean up the mess. It’s what we do, solve problems.